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Code Cleanup

The Agile Samurai, Chapter 13

Technical Debt

Technical debt is the continuous accumulation of shortcuts, hacks,
duplication, and other sins we regularly commit against our code base
in the name of speed and schedule.
The Agile Samurai, Chapter 13

Technical Debt: Not Just Code

While most of our technical debt is code centric, you can also
have it in data and build and configuration files.
I was once part of a large-scale rewrite for a back-end system where
a city name was spelled two different ways. The cost of this
seemingly small difference was huge. Instead of not caring how the
city was spelled, they had to write and carry this extra code and
complexity for as long as that system remained in production,
which for mainframe systems can be a very long time.
The Agile Samurai, Chapter 13

Refactoring

Small incremental code improvements with no change in external behavior